>This is why Microsoft, AWS, and GCP all carefully pretend that there are no free options, and make sure that it's a difficult uphill battle to use Let's Encrypt.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but GCP HTTPS and SSL load balancers give you certificates for free. They support Google's own CA (pki.goog) as well as Let's Encrypt. Full disclosure I work in GCP, but not on this.

https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/ssl-certificate...